The Activist Files Episode 48: We've Always Been Here - The Radical ...

The Activist Files Episode 48: We've Always Been Here The Radical Spirit of Black Feminisms and Abolitionist Organizing

Announcer:

Welcome to The Activist Files, the Center for Constitutional Rights podcast, where we featured the stories of activists, lawyers, and storytellers on the frontlines fighting for justice and liberation. If you want to know more about the Center for Constitutional Rights and our work, visit our website at . You can sign up for our weekly newsletter Frontlines of Justice, and we'll keep you up-to-date on important developments and exciting events near you or online. You can also make a donation to help us keep doing the vital of supporting our partners, movements and communities as always, don't forget to subscribe to The Activist Files and rate us on iTunes, Spotify, and SoundCloud. And now here's The Activist Files podcast.

maya finoh:

Welcome to The Activist Files podcast, um, at the Center for Constitutional Rights. My name is maya finoh. I am the Advocacy Associate at CCR. This Women's History Month CCR is really interested in pushing back on traditional narratives of Women's History Month, that center white, cisgender womanhood. Instead we'd like to uplift the legacy of Black feminist organizing. We're so lucky to be here with Andrea Ritchie, an attorney, author organizer, and co-founder of the Interrupting Criminalization Project and In Our Names Network. Thank you so much for being here today. I really appreciate you.

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The Activist Files Episode 48: We've Always Been Here The Radical Spirit of Black Feminisms and Abolitionist Organizing

Andrea Ritchie:

I appreciate you inviting me. It's really, I have to say I'm a fan of this podcast and to be able to be on it is a real honor, especially for Women's History Month. So I'm excited.

maya finoh:

Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. I just wanna start off with you telling us a bit about the work you're doing with the Interrupting Criminalization Project. What kind of work has been most important and also what can you offer to organizers?

Andrea Ritchie:

So the Interrupting Criminalization Initiative is a partnership between myself and Mariame Kaba, who many folks know is a long time Black feminist abolitionist organizer. And we, uh, our paths have crossed many times over the years in Black feminist abolitionist organizing. And we really wanted to set up a container to approach issues of policing, criminalization, violence, and safety through the lens of Black women, queer, trans folks experiences to employ a Black feminist lens intersectional lens - in our, um, research organizing and advocacy efforts and to serve as a real resource hub and convening space and resource generator for, uh, movements that were engaged in work around policing and criminalization, particularly through the lens of the experiences of women, girls and trans folks. So that's how we started in 2018 and did a lot of research around, you know, what the top five charges of for Black women and girls were experiencing in terms of criminalization, what was driving mass incarceration or, or just incarceration and criminalization of, uh, women, girls and trans people also particularly focused on criminalization of self-defense and survival.

Andrea Ritchie:

So the ways in which Black women, girls, queer and trans folks are criminalized, when we experience violence, as we survive and resist violence, as we survive and resist economic and state violence as well. And then 2020 came along. And one of the things I often say is that when you look at issues of policing and criminalization through the lens of the experiences of Black women, queer and trans people, you get much more quickly to the need for abolition. And so it was a natural step for us to then pivot, to supporting the work of movements, to defund and abolish police in the wake of the police killing of Breonna Taylor. Uh, now two years ago almost to the day on March 13th and, uh, the killing of George Floyd and hundreds of others since then. And so tho in that moment, we stepped in to offer resources to organizers in terms of gathering together demands folks/people were making, gathering, gathering together history context and sort of insights on what the pitfalls and tensions and potential detour on the, uh, road to defunding and abolishing police might be and putting together some resources and toolkits and trainings and opportunities

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The Activist Files Episode 48: We've Always Been Here The Radical Spirit of Black Feminisms and Abolitionist Organizing

for folks to just come together and be in conversation about what we were doing and doing that again through the lens of the fact that many of the people who were leading defund fights in 2020 and beyond are women, queer and trans people, often Black women, queer and trans people, and often Black women, queer and trans people who are survivors of multiple forms of violence.

Andrea Ritchie:

And that's, I think something we've really been able to bring to the conversation is that movements to defund and abolish police are survivor-led movements. And they're led by people who have experienced violence and have not experienced safety, protection, healing, repair, or transformation from policing or punishment and who want more and better for themselves and other survivors and members of their communities, where we might actually rate, uh, greater safety beyond as opposed to what is happening now, where the vast majority of survivors don't rely on policing or punishment because it subjects them to policing and punishment in the first place and it doesn't meet their needs. And so that, I think has been one of the major contributions to this moment that we've been able to make it Interrupting Criminalization and just bringing kind of our combined, you know, 30 years, each of experience of organizing as anti-violence organizers, as anti-policing and criminalization organizers as transformative justice and abolitionist organizers, and as folks who have been engaged in, in various movements over time that are relevant in this moment.

maya finoh:

Well, thank you for sharing your brilliance and something you said really resonated with me that like when you center Black women, queer, trans people, it's easier for you to come down the list. I know there's this really, to me, that this reminds me the work has to always get to the root of the issue. So yeah, I just am astounded by your work. And I also on that note, like, I wanna talk a bit about the fact that you've been, you have been doing this work for 30 plus years. You've been sounding the alarm on police and state violence against women, queer, and trans people, the need to defund institutions like state law enforcement that are causing so much violence against these communities also developing networks and projects that meet community needs. So how does it feel to have the world very slowly catch up to you? I think especially after 2020, we saw this moment where abolition came to the mainstream. I just wonder how does it feel? Um, what also do you believe that the world is still missing? They still haven't caught up to you yet.

Andrea Ritchie:

Wow, I so appreciate that. And when you're saying that, it just reminded me that that perspective of starting from Black women, queer and trans people's experiences is, is deeply rooted in Black feminism. And I just really wanted to name that for Women's History Month that, you know, we start from Black women, queer and trans people's stories, and that's where we theorize from and,

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The Activist Files Episode 48: We've Always Been Here The Radical Spirit of Black Feminisms and Abolitionist Organizing

and our experiences and our, and our visions and our dreams. And that definitely for me, has been how I came to abolition

Through my own experiences, through my mother's experiences of being a survivor of violence and not experiencing any support or safety from the State. Um, and in fact, women in my family experiencing more violence from the State, for me being a survivor myself, and then not experiencing any help from the State when I sought it. And in fact, more violence from the State, um, in the form of police violence.

Andrea Ritchie:

So I think that's where, where this work comes from for me is like my own communities and families and the people, you know, when Ella baker always ask, like, "who are your people?" Who are the people I feel accountable to? What are the communities, um, I feel accountable to, and all of those experiences point me directly to, to abolition. I do describe... For me, there was been a couple of moments. One was actually in 2015 when Say Her Name, which is both a hashtag that was created by the African American Policy Forum. And then the name of a report that I co-authored with, um, Kimberly Crenshaw, when sort of visibility or focus on Black women and to a lesser extent, queer and trans people's experiences of policing kind of became part of a national conversation. I often described it at the time as feeling like I had been talking underwater for decades.

Andrea Ritchie:

And then suddenly I felt like I, my head had popped up above water and suddenly I was being heard and also there were, are lots of other voices talking too. And it, it was amazing. And so, you know, I wrote a book called Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color. And, you know, the title is both a statement of fact, a demand and an aspiration, right? So I think that at that moment, yes, we're never going back to a time hopefully where someone won't at least drop a woman's name in a long list of litany of, of Black men who have been killed by police. And it's still gonna be one I'm finding in a lot of locations and that people will continue to understand issues of policing and criminalization through the lens of men's experiences. Then just kind of tack on a woman's name to the story.

Andrea Ritchie:

And so that's, I think where the demand is, and the aspiration is. Like, what would it actually look like if we understood issues of safety, policing, criminalization, punishment, through the lens of, of Black women, queer and trans folks experiences? It would shift a lot. It would help us understand more quickly and more clearly all the ways in which criminalization happens, all the institutions in which it happens, the ways in which it's essentially imbricated in the very fabric of how carceral

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The Activist Files Episode 48: We've Always Been Here The Radical Spirit of Black Feminisms and Abolitionist Organizing

states operate. Even when we're looking at institutions that we tend to think of as quote-unquote alternatives to policing like healthcare or income support, or, uh, education- that criminalization happens in those spaces. And we see that particularly when it comes to Black mothers, through criminalization of Black parents and mothers through the family policing system. We see that through criminalization, through access to medical care, whether it's drug testing of pregnant people, or criminalization of people in the sex trade who seek assistance, or as we're seeing right now live in Texas as, you know, criminalization of people accessing trans healthcare and their families.

Andrea Ritchie:

And so I think that's the piece that we're missing, right? I think that we, we sometimes are like, we need to get rid of the police in this particular uniform in this particular form, but we're not willing to give up policing as a practice. And we just wanna shift it to a sort of kinder, gentler version, right? Which is, you know, treatment, not punishment. You, maybe you shouldn't be in a jail cell, but we do think you have

to, we're gonna regulate your behavior in one particular way. And as Maya Schenwar and Vicky Law point out so well in Prison by Any Other Name, that experience is, is violent and, uh, repressive and, uh, policing in a different form. And folks from, uh, groups in New York like JMacForFamilies or Movement for Family Power or Dorothy Roberts, who's got a new book, um, Torn Apart, coming out, you know, talk about, again, all of these folks operating from a Black feminist lens, the ways in which the family regulation system has always been about policing, or at least since Black women have been able to access it, has always about policing, uh, Black women, queer and trans folks.

Andrea Ritchie:

So I think that the family regulation system has always been about policing Black women, queer and trans people. And so that's then not the substitute for policing in the forms that we tend to understand it. So I think that's where the world needs to go, that we haven't gotten yet is, is understanding if we don't just use a name, you know, visibility is maybe the starting point, but not the end point. So it's not just that we know a name or we know a story of a Black woman or queer or trans person. We need to look at the issue through the lens of their experience. And then many more forms of police violence will become apparent like police sexual violence, you know, family policing and ripping family separation that happens through policing, not just at the border, but in communities, we'll see forms of policing through access to healthcare, like drug testing of pregnant people. We'll see different locations or sites that it takes place in, like policing of the sex trades or policing, you know, in the drug war that takes the form of strip searches and cavity searches.

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